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1. Future Trends and Technologies That Will Shape the Wireless TELCOs (Available
in Spanish)
Posted by jormarguo Apr 11, 2012
Researching for this blog I’ve encounter a lot of good quality material addressing the “OTT threat” and
how Wireless Telecommunications companies should react in order to monetize efficiently and to avoid
becoming a service pipe. But I think we’re reaching the point where the discussion is wearing out, and as
we’ve seen in the past, the pace of technology evolution doesn’t slow down and even if the right
business case is not ready or at the same level of this progression, eventually such business case
emerges, as I commented in a previous blog entry for IMS (Read it here). So my intention is to highlight
industry trends and future technologies that weather a Communication Service Provider (CSP)
commanding head wants to recognize it or not, from my point of view, will impact current
organizational structure and the way businesses are being conducted now.
Adopt the Pace of Technology: Her Secret Is Embrace
Adopt the pace of nature: her secret is patience –Ralph Waldo Emerson
Inspired by the quote of Mr. Emerson, I cannot help but think in the way wireless industry
breakthroughs had been adopted by mass public, first generation of cellular communications was
around ten years before digital second generation started to be implemented, six years later and phones
started to be sold with all kinds of features, five years later and we witnessed the appearance of the
smartphones. Now we face continuous data consumption growth forecasts, global governments
consider broadband penetration as the main objective to feed national growth, and economic stimulus
is being injected to the industry, telecommunications for developing countries is first in the list of
national infrastructure development, wireless industry research continued despite world economic
turmoil, and the competition is fiercer than ever among manufacturers, CSP and OTTs. So we have an
industry were product life cycles are much shorter and service is migrating towards a user centric
scenario, I’d like to mention the following trends and future technologies that will shape organizational
infrastructure of CSP and how each one of them impose challenges on current company models, these
being: M2M, Cognitive radio and Dynamic Spectrum Access, Heterogeneous Networks, Context Aware
Networks, Quality Models for NGN networks, NFC and innovative short range technologies, and MBB
(Mobile Broadband Adoption) and the new services of the Internet.
All My Life I’ve Been Taught Not To Die, But No One Ever Taught Me How To Change In Order To Grow
Old
All my life I’ve been taught how to die, but no one ever taught me how to grow old–Billy Graham
Right now there are markets around the world experiencing fixed to mobile convergence (FMC) at
various levels, but this was not a gracious move, resistance to change was experience and it was not till
substitution figures started to be significant that something changed in the industry, usually these
moves are slow but end up taking place. We have wireless companies that react against the so called
“Dumb Pipe Syndrome” stating that they’ll become the most efficient pipe in the world, and others that
take action building synergies with employees and content owners to focus away from the network and
centering their attention in the user, whatever the case, the following trends and technologies will force
CSP to do some changes:

2. 1. M2M: Machine to machine networks envision a huge interconnection of appliances and things
through the wireless networks without human assistance, such communication translate into
different data traffic patterns to that produced by smartphones, as well as different service
performance needs; service must work in a myriad of new devices, and the network will have to
be equipped with specialized gateways to centralize communication, manage authentication
and provide some kind of security, on top of that many OTT will want to offer several services to
such network so a new potential universe for walled wardens will be opened.
2. Cognitive Radio and Dynamic Spectrum Access: Right now CSP have a tough job managing their
licensed spectrum in an efficient way, but Dynamic Spectrum Access will pose an even major
task. There will be geographic areas where two services and even two different CSP can share
the same frequency bandwidth which could be licensed or not, so basically the RF team will
have to manage a whole new interference ecosystem, the network might have a new Spectrum
Coordination function, and traffic planning teams will have to model traffic considering the new
interference challenges. This comes not without its opportunities for CSP in the form of wired
backbone replacement for wireless relay nodes for rural coverage, and traffic offloading.
3. MBB Adoption/Cloud Services/Internet of the Future: The change of internet usage pattern
towards a totally mobile environment is driven first by the continuous growth of smartphone
adoption pushing towards an ever growing mobile data consume, secondly cloud services and a
new Internet where open APIs and new browsing intelligence and pattern discerning algorithms
are constructing the possibility of service on the moment for the user, where CSP and OTT no
longer create the service, but you do! As the situation or need you have are the inputs to deliver
a service in the moment you need it. The problem is that as much as the technology has a good
pace, wireless service cannot compete with wired data service in terms of speeds and reliability,
so networks of the future need features like SON and Self configuring networks in the RAN to
handle efficiently the capacity and content caching in the core to move content more closer to
the user to optimize resources.
4. Heterogeneous Networks: The above trend demands bigger speeds of wireless networks, and
the industry is betting on HetNets to fulfill the requirement, having antennas and base stations
more and more closer to the user creating a cell with several layers can effectively increase
speed; the problem with this approach is that with a lot of layers comes a lot of traffic and the
network will require a strong backhaul, wireless nodes will be introduced to relay the signal and
this complicated cell layers will need a different management approach, site acquisition process
has to be redefine, and again the interference and traffic models have to be carefully studied.
5. NFC and Short Range Technology: Having the possibility to use your phone as your primary form
of identification, mode of payment, access to services, physical access to buildings and home are
some of the opportunities that NFC can provide, but a lot of security challenges manifest with
this type of technology and CSP are the main point of thrust for the user. As already discussed, a
new ecosystem of devices needs a specialized effort from the CSP, carefully watching potentially
new holes of security and in a better manner actively helping to construct the applications that
will be running on such ecosystem.
6. Context Aware Networks: A young field of study, which promises that the delivery of
telecommunication service can be so complex and complete that, can expand to every aspect of
our lives. But how do you provision such a service, how do you charge for it, can you even
control it? Will you allow it to grow by itself once you set up a basic flat plan? How CSP legacy
networks can fit in such a service? So a lot of questions, but one thing is sure, this is the ultimate
concept of convergence and I think it can be built upon IMS.
7. Quality models for NGN Networks: If such future scenario where all of these and other concepts
interact through several service flows become real, the way these flows are delivered to the

3. user become the main aspect and asset of a CSP, since the service is going to be focused on the
user, then the quality of the network should be focused on him as well, QoS models will still
have to be applicable but the main objective must be QoE, the way a user experience the service
through the CSP network can set it apart from other CSPs. This approach asks for the
deployment of a new network function, the QoE Controller acting from an E2E perspective,
modifying the way services are triggered, this element should evaluate your location, your
device type, and other aspects to ensure that your experience using all the above services will
be enjoyable.
Because Things Are the Way they Are, Things Will not Stay the Way they Are
Because things are the way they are, things will not stay the way they are–BertoltBrech
Image courtesy of Paola Buelvas Saad (papolareina@yahoo.es)
Current CSP organizational structures cannot face the challenges these trends and technologies will
bring, I agree that cost will be higher and segmentation at various levels of the organizational structure
will result as a consequence of technology adoption, next I’ll briefly highlight the main challenges of a
regular CSP organization structure regarding the considered trends and technologies:
 For RF areas future networks will require them to be a lot more segmented and specialized. The
size of RAN networks calls for the use centralization and self-organizing and self-configuration
features and probably some management functions will be moved to the cloud.
 Core areas of a future wireless Telco will operate under the big umbrella of data services but
housing several enablers, concentrators under strict centralized quality considerations, the
challenge of providing E2E QoE can be so overwhelming for an operation that the area in charge
of this aspect will claim a major importance along with user databases management that will
become more complex requiring a more specialized team and higher security schemes.
 Charging departments will have to be technologically strengthen; in-house SW and processes
will have to be replaced by more flexible tools that enable a quicker reaction to support
deployment of ever coming new services, and dynamic charging for services created by the user.
 O&M must be carefully divided and distributed to keep up with the titanic task, I find hard to
conceive a future wireless Telco without outsourcing a major part of its O&M.

4.  Legal departments must be ready to embark in new agreements negotiations for share usage of
spectrum, a special board of conflict resolution must be created between parties that infringe
interference, service usage, security and other signed pacts of such future environment.
 Service provisioning it’s going to have a major restructuration; a lot of concepts from OTTs must
be used to enrich current CSP provisioning, complex models of service bundling will see the
light, new types of users and ways to interact with the network will demand flexibility and a fast
reconfiguration of the user profile.
 Network Security departments will face an ever growing challenge because the way I see it,
security treats will extend from internet servers towards CSP servers.
So this is in my opinion the panorama that a wireless service provider must face in the coming years, I
left out a lot of functional areas of a company but the subject is broad and the evaluation of a new
model it’s a topic that makes for a complete post of its own.